crucified, baby!”
Then Johnny fell silent until we crossed the Don River, when he decided the time was ripe to share some stories from the street. It sound like a warm-up exercise; one I imagined that Augusta and Sally must have heard many times, for they weren’t listening now, as they whispered alternative selections and chord changes to each other before we parked in an emergency snow removal zone
The girls. To me, a pair of strangers in the Lord. They attended an Associated Gospel Church on Kingston Road that was infamous for icing the dirtiest hockey team in the East Metro Christian League. Augusta, I learned, was a Trinidadian in her sophomore year at York University. The previous winter a Youth for Christ representative had rescued her from Pentecostalism; an affliction she’d so come to dread, I gathered, that she now avoided feeling much of anything just to be on the safe side. She stuttered when she spoke, which wasn’t often, and wouldn’t meet my eyes the whole evening, but she sang without stumbling and without emotion. Sally was a stubby, husky-voiced blonde in a blue parka with a face like one of my grandmother’s old apple dolls. I thought she’d probably make a wonderful grandmother herself, if only she could find someone to get the ball rolling. Augusta and Sally: I never did learn their last names.
“1 didn’t believe there was a God before I believed there was a devil,” Cicero said as we exited the van. “I used to live in outer darkness — no different than some of the people that’ll be out tonight. That’s why I keep coming back. Soul-winning’s my life, and my mission field’s the asphalt jungle.”
Johnny, I hear, also had a wife and three children. But they were already saved, I suppose.
“I’m really glad to be here tonight to tell you what the Lord’s done for me.”
It was nearly seven by the time Augusta and Sally closed their last set with “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” (upon Cicero’s recommendation, after his late scratch of “Silent Night”), and my 15 minutes finally arrived. The snowfall had stopped during Cicero’s second call to repentance, and what remained on the ground had either been churned to slush by ten thousand pairs of Kodiaks or spotted the pavement like a field of dandelions gone to seed. Johnny had assured me that I needn’t stand on the chair if it would make me uncomfortable. “Naturally the girls don’t use it,” he’d said. I took that as a dare. When I stepped up there were perhaps a dozen people standing in a ragged crescent around it, almost half seemingly friends or groupies of “the girls” (a couple of them I recognized from their church hockey team) come to provide them with an assured audience. Now — with a wave, an embrace and a chuck on the shoulder — three of them and then a fourth began to drift away. My mother had made me a similar offer but I’d begged her to stay home, promising to drop by later so together we could weep through It’s a Wonderful Life. (The Wayne Rogers, Mario Thomas version.) Facing Yonge and Dundas — the Caesar’s Palace for Canadian open air evangelists — with the lurid fluorescence of the Eaton Centre glowing red and green at my back, I was sorry she wasn’t here.
Much of the sidewalk traffic was done with and home for the holidays, but there remained lots of straggling workaholics and frenetic mall hounds for me to harangue. A number of them, laden with bags and looking unseasonably ugly, would pull a Moses and part the crusade team from our congregation in order to beat the lights. At the Dundas curb just beyond our little band, a fresh clique of commuters formed every ten minutes or so to await the next streetcar. Mostly they pretended we weren’t there, but a couple of faces would turn towards me, and another couple of ears.
“You’ve just heard Augusta and Sally sing about a ‘love so amazing, so divine
Giving my testimony was no big deal. At Bible School, “How did you come to know the Lord?” was as common a question as “What kind of soup is this?” and “Can we take our ties off yet?” But now at this gig for nonhelievers, I felt like a stand-up Christian suddenly unsure of the strength of his material. “Lord,” I whispered during Augusta and Sallys last song, “please, make me interesting.”
After all, it’s not as though this were the only show in town. Less than half a block south an African Methodist preacher was in full flight, his voice carrying up the street like a snowball with a pebbled heart. I was also competing with the Salvation Army thrash and bugle corps dug in at the northeast corner of Dundas, who were storming through the scripturally suspect “I Saw Three Ships.” Then there was the warty street vendor peddling flags of the world and windup, cymbal-crashing monkeys; a pensioner playing chess for chump change, who looked like a Santa who’d lost his bag of toys; and our ever-engaging and truly world class assortment of demented and derelict urban garden gnomes. All of that, over-dubbed with an aural collage of a thousand fleeting monologues, attitudes and conversations.
Most critically, I was competing with the example of Johnny Cicero: a man who’d sinned — “sinned grandly,” he boasted — and so had a larder full of lurid anecdotes with which to flavour the gospel. My life before Christ just hadn’t been very spicy. What kind of a witness was 1, when almost everyone in earshot who wasn’t asleep in momma’s arms must have been more seasoned in vice than myself? I was parsley to Johnny’s curry: nolo contendere.
“I’m here today because I want to tell you how that same love has changed my life.”
The wail of an ambulance graciously interrupted me. Black ice and a choked intersection slowed its progress north on Yonge, and as heads turned towards the street mine turned to Johnny. He pursed his lips in a playful frown and nodded encouragement. Two fire trucks and a Mr Pong’s Chinese Food delivery car followed straightaway, and I waited until they passed before trying again.
“Like I was saying … you’ve been hearing a lot about the love of God this evening. I’d like to share with you some of what that love has meant for me.”
“Preach it, brother!”
“Glory to Jai-sus! Praise Gawd and Halleylooyah!”
“Can somebody give me an amen?”
Two young toughs, full of roguery and eggnog, taunted me in tacky TV Evangelese while sprinting behind my back and across Dundas for an idling westbound streetcar. Besides one chippy defenceman who lingered long enough to mask his laugh in a cough, my humble flock didn’t flinch. Behind them at the eastbound stop, however, five or six were curious enough to cast sly, sidelong glances towards the punks, to me and then back to their paper or bootlaces with a smirk and chuckle. But for one, the rest behaved as I used to in math class when I’d neglected an assignment: Don’t react and avoid eye contact — you might get called upon.
That single exception was a young woman in candy cane coloured tights and a black leather jacket that was at least three sizes too big for her. Her head was bare, and her squidink hair had been given a brush cut much like many a floor monitor’s in a Bible School boy’s dorm. She wore no gloves, and though I could see her breath and her hands looked chapped, she didn’t even warm them inside a jacket pocket — even the one that was without a cigarette. She wasn’t smirking like some, and she didn’t have her back to me like the others. No — she was smiling right at me.
Though on my bad days, these days, I believe that in the end we’re all just carbon deposits, to be mined like the dinosaurs by creatures which we can’t imagine, on that day a stranger’s smile was enough to transport me to the bosom of Abraham. Suddenly I didn’t worry if I was dull. I wouldn’t have minded if everyone dismissed me as just a gangly Bible-thumper who couldn’t whistle even a single song of experience. Everyone but this one young woman. Perhaps most remarkably, I no longer cared about the Christian service points. Suddenly it was so much bigger than that.
As when the Lord flashed his backside to Moses on Sinai,
